Estimates? We Don’t Need No Stinking Estimates!

I wonder if software developers are really any more recalcitrant than other intellectual laborers when it comes to project management estimates. Creative endeavors are always filled with talented people oblivious to the needs of business managers. Or is just that there are so many more programmers filling our software-driven world?

“How a hashtag lit the nerdy world of project management aflame, or at least got it mildly worked up!”

from Medium.com

“At 5:53 p.m. on Dec. 10, 2012, Woody Zuill sent out a tweet that read:

#NoEstimates — I’ve added a little more fuel to the fire”

“The tweet linked to a blog post he’d written describing a heretical approach to software development — one that omits the standard step of estimating the time and resources a project will need.”

“Zuill and his #NoEstimates allies say they intend the term as an invitation to a conversation.”

“As long as we’ve been making software, we’ve been screwing up its deadlines. Beginning in the 1960s, as industry began to demand ambitious software projects, programmers began to find that the harder they tried to deliver polished work on time, the more miserably they failed. In the 1960s Frederick Brooks, tasked with leading a massive IBM programming project, famously discovered that adding more programmers to a late software project only makes it later.”

“Real” engineers who work with the physical world don’t shun estimating; maybe software engineers just need to take the skill seriously.